With files from Jeffrey Shallit
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science graduate Luke Schaeffer, has been awarded the Governor General’s Gold Medal for highest standing in a Master's program. The selection was made from a group of nominees with superb intellectual achievement and international reputation established while they were students.
Schaeffer's thesis (supervised by Jeffrey Shallit) titled Deciding Properties of Automatic Sequences studies a difficult topic of computer science: some delicate and profound relations between combinatorics on words and logic.
During his time as a student, Schaeffer published 5 papers, solved 2 open problems, improved existing theoretical analysis and results, raised new questions and provided new answers on important questions in theoretical computer science and mathematics.
"This level of achievement is what one would expect to see from a good postdoctoral fellow or a person who is in the early stages of a tenure-track position. He also has an exceptional record as a teaching assistant and always goes far beyond what is required," said supervisor Jeffrey Shallit.
Schaeffer has been awarded two prestigious graduate scholarships during his time at Waterloo, including the David R. Cheriton Graduate Scholarship and the NSERC Alexander Graham Bell Canada Graduate Scholarship.